United States
military documents tell the story vividly. In the
Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of West Africa, an
unmanned mini-submarine deployed from the USS
Freedom detects an "anomaly": another small
remotely-operated sub with welding capabilities
tampering with a major undersea oil pipeline.

The American submarine's "smart software"
classifies the action as a possible threat and
transmits the information to an unmanned drone
flying overhead. The robot plane begins collecting
intelligence data and is soon circling over a nearby

vessel, a possible
mother ship, suspected of being involved with the
"remote welder".

At a hush-hush "joint
maritime operations center" onshore, analysts pour
over digital images captured by the unmanned sub
and, according to a Pentagon report, recognize the
welding robot "as one recently stolen and acquired
by rebel antigovernment forces". An elite
quick-reaction force is assembled at a nearby
airfield and dispatched to the scene, while a
second unmanned drone is deployed to provide
persistent surveillance of the area of operations.

And with that, the drone war is on.

At the joint maritime operations center,
signals intelligence analysts detect the mother
ship launching a Russian Tipchak - a
medium-altitude, long-endurance, unmanned aircraft
with "US-derived systems and avionics" and
outfitted with air-to-air as well as
air-to-surface missiles. It's decision time for US
commanders. Special Operations Forces are already
en route and, with an armed enemy drone in the
skies ahead of them, possibly in peril.

But the Americans have an ace up their
sleeve: an advanced air force MQ-1000. Unlike the
MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper, the MQ-1000 is
capable of completely autonomous action, right
down to targeting and combat.

Pre-programmed with the requirements and
constraints of the mission, the advanced drone
takes off and American commanders let it do its
thing. "The MQ-1000 ... immediately conducts an
air-to-air engagement and neutralizes the
Tipchak," reads the understated official account
of the action. The special ops team then raids the
mothership and disrupts the oil pipeline
interdiction scheme.

The entire episode
involves a seamless integration of robots and
troops working in tandem, of next-generation
drones "wired" together and operating in teams,
and of autonomous drones making their own
decisions. But there's a reason you've never read
about this mission in the New York Times or the
Washington Post. It won't take place for 20 years.

Or will it? The "African Maritime
Coalition Vignette, 2030s" is a scenario offered
up in Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, FY
2011-2036, a recently released 100-page Defense
Department document outlining American robotic
air, sea, and land war-fighting plans for the
decades ahead. It's the sunny side of a future
once depicted in the Terminator films in which
flying hunter-killer or "HK" units are sent out to
exterminate the human race.

Terminators
of today?In some ways, of course, the
future is now. When the first Terminator movie was
released in 1984, its HKs seemed as futuristic as
its time-traveling cyborg title-character. Nearly
three decades later, we're living in an age in
which armed robots do regularly surveil, track,
and kill people. But instead of a self-aware
computer network known as Skynet, it's the
American president or his intelligence officials
and military officers who determine the human
targets to be terminated by unmanned hunter-killer
craft.

Washington's post-9/11 military
interventions have been a boon for drones. The
numbers tell the story. At the turn of this
century, the Department of Defense had 90 drones
with plans to increase the inventory by 200 over
the next decade, according to Dyke Weatherington,
a Defense Department deputy director overseeing
acquisitions of hardware for unmanned warfare. As
2012 began, there were more than 9,500 remotely
piloted aircraft in the US arsenal.

Today,
the army, navy, air force, marines and special
operations command all field drones with names
that sound as if they were ripped from a Hollywood
script or a comic book: Sentinel, Avenger, Wasp,
Raven, Puma, Shadow, Scan Eagle, Global Hawk,
Hunter, Gray Eagle, Predator, and Reaper. The
latter three, Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap
notes, "are weaponized to conduct offensive
operations, irregular warfare, and high-value
target/high value individual prosecution, and this
trend will likely continue."

The air
force's MQ-1 Predator has been the workhorse of
America's hunter-killer drone fleet. By the end of
2001, Predators had cumulatively flown 25,000
hours. By this March, according to statistics
provided by the Air Force, they had logged
1,127,400 flight hours, 1,041,740 of them in
combat.

The military quit buying Predators
in 2010, opting instead for the larger, more
heavily armed Reaper. These have flown more than
261,000 hours, including 228,000 in combat. The
Air Force has already requested the purchase of 24
new Reapers in 2013 and Air Force spokesperson
Jennifer Spires tells TomDispatch it plans to buy
a grand total of 401 MQ-9s in the coming years.

In other ways, however, a sci-fi-style
future is far off indeed. In fact, after a decade
of Defense Department cheerleading, as well as
endless TV and newspaper puff pieces on the
unlimited potential of drone technology, a grimmer
and dimmer future for them is coming into view.

As a start, most of the drones in the
Pentagon's inventory aren't sophisticated
hunter-killer robots, but smaller, unarmed
tactical models used only for battlefield
surveillance. According to figures provided to
TomDispatch by the Army, that service has
approximately 5,000 drones, about 1,400 of them
currently supporting operations in Afghanistan
(where one of their key models, the Shadow,
collided with a cargo plane last year). While it
has plans to arm increasing numbers of its larger
models with munitions, they're hardly the stuff of
Hollywood sci-fi flicks.

Even the Predator
and the Reaper are little more than expensive,
error-prone, overgrown model airplanes remotely
"flown" by all-too-human pilots. They tend to
crash at an alarming rate due to weather,
mechanical failures, and computer glitches,
leaving shattered silver-screen techno-dreams of
cheap, error-free, futuristic warfare in the dust.

Today's armed drones are actually the weak
sisters of the weapons world. Even the Reaper is
slow, clumsy, unarmored, generally unable to
perceive threats around it, and - writes defense
expert Winslow Wheeler - "fundamentally incapable
of defending itself." While Reapers have been
outfitted with missiles for theoretical air-to-air
combat capabilities, those armaments would be
functionally useless in a real-world dogfight.

Similarly, in a 2011 report, the Air Force
Scientific Advisory Board admitted that modern air
defense systems "would quickly decimate the
current Predator/Reaper fleet and be a serious
threat against the hi cellPadding=IMG height=/images/f_images/sidespacer5.gifgh-flying Global Hawk."
Unlike that MQ-1000 of 2030, today's top drone
would be a sitting duck if any reasonably armed
enemy wanted to take it on. In this sense, as in
many others, it compares unfavorably to current
manned combat aircraft.

The navy's even
newer MQ-8B Fire Scout, a much-hyped drone
helicopter that has been tested as a weapons
platform, has also gone bust. Not only was one
shot down in Libya last year, but repeated crashes
have caused the Navy to ground the robo-copter
"for the indefinite future".

Even the
highly classified RQ-170 Sentinel couldn't stay
airborne over Iran during a secret mission that
suddenly became very public last year. Whether or
not an Iranian attack brought down the drone, the
Air Force Scientific Advisory Board report makes
it clear that there are numerous methods by which
remotely piloted aircraft can potentially be
thwarted or downed, from the use of lasers and
dazzlers to blind or damage sensors to simple
jammers to disrupt global positioning systems, not
to mention a wide range of cyber-attacks, the
jamming of commercial satellite communications,
and the spoofing or hijacking of drone data links.
Smaller tactical unmanned aircraft may be
even more susceptible to low-tech attacks, not to
mention constrained in their abilities and
cumbersome to use. Sergeant Christopher Harris, an
Army drone pilot and infantryman, described the
limitations of the larger of the two hand-launched
drones he's operated in Afghanistan this way: the
13-pound Puma was best used from an observation
post with some elevation; it only had a 12-mile
range and, though theoretically possible to take
on patrol, was "a beast to carry around" once the
weight of extra batteries and equipment was
factored in.

Terminators of
tomorrow?As for the future, the Air
Force's 2011-2036 Roadmap has already hit a major
detour. In 2010, Air Force magazine breathlessly
announced, "Early in the next decade, the Air
Force will deploy a new, stealthy RPA - currently
called the MQ-X - capable of surviving in heavily
defended airspace and performing a wide variety of
ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance]
and strike missions."